‘Time’ was a song T wrote the day before he turned thirty in 2006. A few months previously, he and the Southern Time team had put on the first iteration of ‘Southern Time’ as a multimedia stage production in Vancouver, B.C. Despite being incredibly in monetary debt, T had much hope and inspiration for what his future might hold.
‘Tralfamador’ came as a most pleasant surprise as the Southern Time Band was recording ‘Lost in Love No More’ in the spring of 2020. Bryant Didier, the band’s bassist and producer, got inspiration from the brief intro of ‘Desert Moon’ to expand the piano chord arpeggio into an eventual, nearly one-minute soundscape of instrumental oblivion.
When T turned twenty-six, soon after he moved into his place in downtown Vancouver in 2002, now determined to make his ‘rock star dreams’ a reality, ‘Desert Moon’ was one of the songs he wrote. T had lived with HIV for six or seven years by now, and ‘Desert Moon’ encapsulates the feeling of isolation, marginalization, HIV stigma, and despair he had been feeling.
In 2004, T wrote ‘Searching For Love.’ He played the cello and piano in a few rock bands for a couple of years but did not choose music as his career only to play ‘second fiddle.’ Since testing HIV positive in 1996 when he was twenty, he wanted to make the world better through his compelling story and musical talents, so in 2004 he attended a four-week workshop where artists learned how to merge business with their art. It was then that T realized that his story and music would best be told in ‘rock opera’ form!
And, ‘Lies’ is what one gets for ‘searching for love in all the wrong places.’ T wrote this song when he was twenty-eight in 2004. He was fed up with the vain promises and fake personas in Vancouver’s music industry, let alone the apparent lies in the mainstream media, specifically regarding the ‘War on Terror.’ Lies in religion lies everyone tells everyone ~ why our world is so messed up.
‘Neville’ was a song inspired by the breakthrough in the reconciliation process he and the cello professor who infected T with HIV were having in 2014. Not too long after, though, the professor refused to give T’s consent to represent his likeness in the screenplays for the Southern Time story T was writing at the time. However, for a moment in time (and for a couple of years before the professor passed away in 2018), T and the professor genuinely loved each other for the first time. T describes this song’s lyrics as “coming to terms with one’s inner child, the masculine, feminine, animalistic and God parts within every one of us.”
‘Hey, Charlie’ was a song T wrote in 2018 in preparation for AIDS 2018 and inspired by the full reconciliation he and the professor who infected him with HIV obtained a year and a half earlier. T’s professor passed away a few months later. T wrote it from a five or six-year-old Dreamer and Chuck’s (the name of the character representing the professor in the ‘Southern Time Tetralogy’) perspective. It is a message that, if Dreamer and Charlie as children and adults can find a way to reconcile and become best of friends, perhaps the rest of the world can also find their restorative justice.
The last song in the album’s order and heard in the above player and the video below is ‘When The Fired Dreams.’ It is the most ‘poppy-sounding’ song on the album, other than ‘Hey Charlie.’ T and Bryant wrote it together over the last year (2019 – 2020). It is included as a BONUS TRACK when you purchase the album as a whole.
Purchase the songs from ‘Lost in Love No More’ at www.southerntimeband.com now!!!
